Ffestiniog Travel: 40 years of classic rail journeys

Ffestiniog Travel, the railway heritage group that became a tour operator, is
40 years old – and sending enthusiasts to some exotic places, including
Kosovo and Borneo, and on a round-the-world anniversary tour

It wouldn’t happen on a railway holiday – one of the passengers had just climbed down on to the track to re-couple the carriage to the loco. Strangely, though, once we were rumbling and creaking back down the line and he was inspecting the grease he’d got on his trousers, it was clear he’d been in his element. It was half-term week, and this was meant to be the first day of the season on the 2ft-gauge Ffestiniog Railway in North Wales, but the winter storms had brought trees down across the lower section of the line, and the only train running that afternoon was the throaty little diesel Moelwyn, tugging our one-coach special up the top half from Tan y Bwlch to Blaenau Ffestiniog.

These days the Ffestiniog and its sister line, the Welsh Highland, which enthusiasts recently completed rebuilding all the way from Caernarvon, carry more than 400,000 tourists a year behind their unique pointing-both-ways Fairlie steam engines. Conversation at Harbour Station in Porthmadog in the morning had been drowned out by drilling to remodel platforms and tracks for ever more trains. But there’s more than that to celebrate: 2014 also marks the 40th anniversary of Ffestiniog Travel, the railway’s travel agency arm, which sends railway wayfarers out across the world in quest of the Great Railway Journey.

The silver-haired man who got his hands dirty up at Blaenau remembers back to 1974, when a folded, duplicated sheet of A4 with typewritten text and a pastel-drawn loco on the cover constituted the inaugural brochure of Ffestiniog Travel, for an escorted railway holiday in Switzerland. “The point was that we were taking some of our supporters to see how professional narrow-gauge railways were run,” explained Alan Heywood – who at 73 still comes into the company’s offices every day.

Go back another 20 years to 1955, and a teenage Heywood had come down from Bury to the Ffestiniog for the day with his school railway society, and ended up staying for a week to volunteer. The railway had only just been reopened by preservationists after 10 years’ closure, “and the grass was that high it was like the trains were coming in through a hayfield. In those days volunteering was very ad hoc – it was a case of going down to Boston Lodge Works and saying, 'Can I help?’ ”

Alan and his mates were handed a couple of cans of Bitumastic and some brushes and told to slop it over the roof of coach 14. “That was the evening we arrived. There weren’t the same employment-of-children considerations: I was only 15 – today it would be illegal!” Apart from a few years’ teaching, he has been at the Ffestiniog ever since, at one point rising to head the railway company, and always centrally involved with the travel side.

But what led to Ffestiniog Travel in the very first place was even more prosaic, and down to British Rail, explained Maria Cook, the general manager. Back in the Seventies BR wanted to de-staff the stations along the Cambrian Coast Line from the Dovey estuary up through Porthmadog, and it approached the Ffestiniog to become an authorised railway ticket agent for Britain. (You can still buy a saver return from Bangor to Euston via the Ffestiniog, or indeed, as a poster at its offices proclaims, an all-in trip to see Ellie Goulding at the O2.) That in turn led to German and Dutch visitors to the Ffestiniog asking it to book their ferry tickets over from Hook of Holland – and to make up the numbers to secure a European ticketing licence, the agency hit upon the Switzerland jaunt.

Nowadays the brochure is a sumptuous thing, and horizons have broadened to the extent that on May 3 the company’s 40th-anniversary tour will depart from St Pancras for a 40-day railway odyssey around the world. Old favourites such as India’s hill railways remain popular (the Ffestiniog has ties with the hallowed Darjeeling line, though its counterparts’ willingness to barge parked Land Rovers aside with an antique steam engine put paid to a planned locomotive swap) and Michael Portillo has generated a lot of business in Britain through his television programmes. However, today’s aficionados want to see new names up on the departure board.

Cook is disappointed that they’ve had to postpone an inaugural tour to Eritrea, to climb 7,500ft from the Red Sea by narrow-gauge railway to the capital, Asmara: “First the railway got washed away, but they’re pretty quick in Eritrea – they got the army on it – and then they ran out of coal, which they get from Zimbabwe. When the railway company can pay for its coal, we’ll get there.”

She and her colleagues are currently fixing up a bespoke itinerary for one well-travelled couple who want to go to Madagascar. Does it actually have any railways? “There’s one,” says Heywood. And Kosovo, which he recced last year, is in the brochure for the first time. Much of the country’s own rolling stock was destroyed, so when Heywood took the train from the capital, Pristina, to Peja up in the Rugova mountains, he found himself riding in Austrian and Swedish carriages, still in original livery: “I think the locomotive was Norwegian.”

On the Swiss Alpine Holiday, the spectacular scenery on the way to Chur spools by through the panoramic windows of the air-conditioned Glacier Express; on the other hand, taking people to somewhere like Macedonia, to which the Kosovo tour continues, requires managing expectations, says Heywood: “A lot of money has gone into developing Skopje as a beautiful classical city. The hotels are nice, but the railway is definitely Third World – and Albania is even worse. But what these countries lack in infrastructure, they make up for in friendliness.”

Has any tour really taken Heywood back to those pioneering, ramshackle days on the Ffestiniog? He told me a tale about a Romanian tour guide called Ramona, to whom he got chatting on the Eurostar while leading a tour out to the steam gala in Germany’s Harz mountains. This led to her showing him her country’s narrow-gauge logging railways: “There you are going back in time.” You can see what he means from the photograph in the brochure: a tiny steam engine halts on rails poking through the grass for the driver to shoot the breeze, while a horse and cart plods by.

Where next? Burma before too long, and, were the Middle East a little more stable, Jordan’s Hedjaz railway, of Lawrence of Arabia fame. Some great destinations, however, are now out of bounds: “Peshawar to the Khyber Pass used to be a pilgrimage for anyone interested in exotic railways, but you wouldn’t take anyone there at the moment.” A lot of the best lines in South Africa have closed over the past 20 years – though that has meant the Ffestiniog could acquire some giant Garratt locomotives from sugarcane railways to tackle the steep gradients on the Welsh Highland.

What a great idea, I mused: a modern, commercial travel agency subsidising nostalgic railway buffs to run their antique, and inevitably loss-making, steam trains. Heywood put me right. The profits aren’t given to the Ffestiniog Railway Company, whose operations need no subsidy anyway (though they do rely on a lot of volunteer labour). Rather, they go to its charitable trust: “They pay for various projects. In recent years they’ve helped build three new carriages for the Ffestiniog, and made a big contribution to a new locomotive for the Welsh Highland. Even that racket going on at Harbour Station this morning – we probably paid for some of that…”

Ffestiniog Travel has links with the Rocky Mountaineer in Canada. Photo: Alamy

Before jumping aboard the two o’clock from Tan y Bwlch, we’d been to Boston Lodge Works, where Alan pointed out a bulbous green contraption in the yard: Welsh Pony, one of the Ffestiniog’s original 19th-century steam locos, and next in line for restoration. It struck me there was something felicitous in the Ffestiniog, of all lines, taking railway pilgrims to far-flung shrines: back in 1864 it was, quite simply, the first railway anywhere in the world to run passenger trains on a narrow-gauge line. From Colorado’s Georgetown Loop mining railway, with its soaring trestle bridge, to India’s Nilgiri rack railway, creeping up to the hill station of Ootacamund, the Ffestiniog has made many others possible.

Moelwyn was now approaching the level crossing at Tanygrisiau, and the weekend’s torrential rain had knocked out the signalling and the barriers. We slowed to a crawl. A ghostly whistle would have been best, but the slabby diesel managed a defiant horn, blaring out to the Ffestiniog’s extended family all over the world: remember where you heard it first.

New tours for 2014

Around the World Anniversary Tour, May 3 for 40 days: £19,695

Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania, May 7-19 (fully booked for 2014; to be repeated 2015): £1,650

Vietnam and North Borneo, October 24-November 14: £3,375

Wales, from North to South, September 12-24: £1,415

Rhine, from Sea to Source, June 6-18: £1,985

Prices are per person, based on two people sharing, and include flights where applicable. For full details contact Ffestiniog Travel (01766 772030; ffestiniogtravel.com)